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Effects of credit crisis apparently not hitting local economy yet

Many of the county’s larger employers are governmental entities, such as city, county and state government.

But does that make them safer places when it comes to their employees and expenses?

“Not necessarily,” said Jon Peacock, Mesa County administrator. “It depends on how well the entity has planned and what kind of financial condition they’re in. If an entity is highly leveraged with debt, and revenue doesn’t come in as projected, those revenues won’t have as much for operating expenditures. I suspect when we look nationwide, there are public sector entities that have to scale back as a result of the financial downturn nationally.”

Peacock said Mesa County has been proactive and is budgeting to be debt-free by 2011.

“The credit issues are not an issue for us at this time,” he said. “As far as cash goes, we have additional cash on hand to meet our planned expenses, so we are not affected by any of the tightening up in the overnight credit markets.

“Of course, we’ve seen some slowing down in our local credit market. We’ve budgeted pretty conservatively.

We don’t anticipate we’d have to take any measures like layoffs. That is not something we will have to do. We have adequate fund balance and revenues.

“What the credit crisis will mean in our upcoming budget we’ll be looking at for 2009 is we’ll have to be very conservative in approaching any spending increases. We’re not anticipating robust revenue growth as we have in the last few years.”